Google opens a PDF software library called the PDFium open source project, developers can incorporate a variety of platform applications.
According preacher Google's Chromium project, he said François Beaufort, PDFium will be packed into the Google Chrome browser, to replace closed source code.
Chrome browser most of the code is open source, but there are a small part because of the license is not open source, such as Flash plug-ins and Adobe PDF file systems.
Senior Software Engineer Chrome's user interface team of Peter Kasting said that after the use PDFium, Chrome in a major part is now open source, and this is a great initiative. Chrome because it reduces the number of closed-source part, and one might suspect that we (closed source) that part of wrongdoing in use.
PDFium an important part of the library - rendering engine, developed by Foxit Software (Foxit Software) from China. Foxit PDF focus on creating products around standards, they said it would support the project and hosted it on Google Code.
Peter Kasting said, "Foxit is in the open source world highest quality PDF engine, can now be used as reference to other projects."
PDFium will use the BSD-3 open source license, which allows developers to modify and redistribute the code with the appropriate copyright notice.